Stone’s covert glances suffice to confirm: she has lost her repertoire for defeating anxiety. But then, she has never really had such repertoire. She never needed any; she didn’t know what anxiety was. She sits quietly, trying to smile, smoothing her chopped hair. On the outskirts of Toledo, listening to a call-in show on the possibility of opening up a second Security Front, she says, “Tell me the craziness is over, Russell.”
He tells her.
She doesn’t need to stop to stretch or relieve herself. She needs nothing to eat or drink. She wants only to keep driving. When they do stop for gas outside Sandusky, she won’t take more than three steps away from the car.
Stone buys a real map and studies it. He discovers that they should have headed north out of the city toward Flint, to cross over the border at Port Huron. They could still double back, swing up to Detroit and cross to Windsor. But he decides it’s too late to do anything but follow the long skirt south of the lakes, toward the crossings another few hundred miles to the east.
He apologizes for lengthening the trip. She pats his shoulder and lays her cheek against it. “Everything is fine,” she tells him. “Don’t worry. I don’t care, if only we’re getting closer.”
She’ll be better when they’re farther down the road. She’s had more practice at being well than anyone Stone has ever known. If she can’t find her center once they’re free and clear, then humans have no center honest enough to be worth finding.
Somewhere still in Ohio the radio becomes too much, and Thassa sends the voices into limbo. Silence then is glorious, keeping them alert and safe for a good thirty-five minutes. After another half an hour, even silence adds to the weight of breathing.
Beyond the expressway shoulder, distant descendants of Burma-Shave signs flick past. Thassa reads them out loud, for no reason except to speed another fifteen seconds. “Terrorists love,” she murmurs above the wheel noise. “Gun control. An unarmed public. Is their goal.”
Her sunglasses rest on top of the unnervingly cropped dyed hair. The scarf is shed, nowhere. She holds her camera on her lap, often lifting and pointing it over the dash or through the passenger window. If she’s really filming, all she’s getting is desolate Midwest motion blur. She reads through the viewfinder, chasing the tiny white signs with her lens. “Tested in peace. Proven in war. Guns in the home. Even the score.”
She reads aloud at odd intervals, for more than an hour. “Two million dead in Darfur Sudan,” she tells him. “And it all started with a gun ban.”
She looks at him for explanations. He offers none. She says, to the window, “I see why Dr. Kurton wants to upgrade people.”
He says, “Tell me about your brother.” The question surprises them both. Her vision dimples, and she’s off, remembering stories she hasn’t told anyone in years. Mohand organizing a World Cup in the streets around the Parc de la Louisiane with boys from eleven different countries. His thinking that Quebec winters weren’t fit even for animals. Wanting to become the premier Amazigh Canadian hip-hop artist, practicing for hours in the council apartment’s bathroom, driving their aunt and uncle mad. How he planned to make a living as a male model, and how he spent five months’ savings on a portfolio of publicity shots that came to nothing. How he blamed all the troubles in his life on having to learn his native language after he already spoke two others. How he left Montreal and returned to Algiers just to prove that his mind hadn’t been permanently colonized by two hundred years of nightmare.
Russell needs to know: Have you told him what’s happening to you? But he doesn’t ask. It’s enough for now that her tales of Mohand return Thassa a little to herself.
Miles down the road, she takes off her seat belt, ignoring the car’s bleating protests. She spins around up on her knees, nestles into the seat back, and films the interstate disappearing behind them. She speaks to the vanishing landscape. “How can I thank you, Mister? You saved me. You were the only one I could call. I was letting them kill me a little, back there.”
“I did nothing. I just love you.” His militant demurral pops out of him before he hears it. Blood runs uphill into his face, and he wants to red-pen his whole existence.
She swings back down onto the seat, facing him. Weight lifts off her, and for a moment, she’s invulnerable again, converting all the world’s madness into grateful play. She clasps his right thigh near the knee and shakes it, making him accelerate. “Don’t you think I know this thing, Russell Stone? You are a very amusing fellow, sometimes.”
It takes another twenty miles for his pulse to return to base rate. She stays aloft for the whole stretch, scribbling into an art notebook, smiling to herself. “Always keep a journal of your day. You never know when you might experience something you want to remember!” How she can work without carsickness is a mystery as profound as the rest of her physiology.
In the jutting nub of Pennsylvania, Thassa pulls a phone from her purse and calls her aunt. Stone can decode nothing except the otherworldly, musical cadence, the switches from French to Arabic. She’s relating some story with no emotional tie whatsoever to the nightmare she has just escaped. Stone listens, grateful for every note that sounds like the woman who sat in his classroom last fall, reminding the entire roster that only a fool tries to decide more than God.
If she mentions an estimated arrival in Montreal, it must be on some scale of mountain time that Stone has never experienced. She hangs up without any explanation aside from “Good food waiting for us at home, Mister.”
They pass billboards for everything-clothing outlets, telcom packages, medical supplies, fast food and faster drink, starter homes, recreational vehicles, casinos, lottery tickets, psychological counseling, secret surefire investments, teen abstinence, sex-toy warehouses, partnering websites, and cutting-edge prophecy services.
“Give in to the Present,” Thassa reads.
“What?” he snaps.
She flinches, then giggles. “It’s just a sign, Russell. ‘Give in to the Pleasant. Pleasant taste of ’ ”
“Oh,” he says. “Of course.”
“Avoid hell,” she says, her affect falling again. “Repent. Trust Jesus now. Next exit sixty miles.”
Somewhere between Fredonia and Angola, New York-in short, smack in the middle of implausible invention-they stop to get more gas. She’s edgy again, in the parking lot of the service station. She dons the sunglasses and head scarf before she gets out of the car, as if disguise is just common sense. Maybe she’s right. Proliferating pictures of the bliss mutant long ago stole her freedom of movement.
The nineteen-year-old behind the cash register does gawk at her, but only, Stone hopes, the way any young American heterosexual hormonal firestorm from upstate New York would gawk at a twenty-three-year-old Berber in a drab olive sweat suit and bad hair dye.
The map suggests they shoot north at Syracuse and cross at a place called Thousand Islands. Thassa measures the distance with a barrette and calculates the remaining travel time on her fingers. They’re halfway home, and if they push, they could pull into Montreal before sunrise. She breathes easier, seeing how close they are to the border. But even an Algerian-especially an Algerian-ought to know this genre.
They pass through archaic resort towns, famous ghost wrecks of American industrial history, collapsed utopian and religious communities. They talk about everything now-her parents’ infatuated anger toward the French, his long fascination with the Unabomber, the mythic origin of the Kabyles, a fantastic Egyptian film he saw eleven years ago and has never since been able to identify, an old family car that he and his brother once wrecked, the varied agendas of the world’s great cities, the odds of humanity soon cooking to death, a thrush that once threw itself at her bedroom window at ten-second intervals for the better part of two days.